Never Be Angry at Work

I think this attitude is fine if you are the sole stakeholder and IP owner (e.g. a personal project or a small business you own). But not for something you are building in collaboration with other engineers for someone else's ownership.

[1] Artists do often make works for client IP, in which cases, they also do not have full creative control of their output!

I'm getting paid to build someone else's project. I enjoy the work I'm making so I build it the best I can given the time constraints. I'm a paid worker, not an artists. Every entropy that I add to this system, is entropy that delays capital income to the whole company, so that entropy needs to be productive and not fundamentalist following unnecessary perfectionism. If something can be done quickly but imperfectly and still be relatively well maintained with manageable debt, so be it, that's what delivers the most value to the whole company. It's a bit one sided if I banged by foot no the ground and said "no, this will take 6 more months that what you want because I want it to be done in my perfect way". And this idea of perfectionism crumbles even more when you realise your idea of perfect is not objective. There's always someone else who has a better and more perfect idea than yours.

This doesn't conflict with the programming I do on my personal projects. Personal projects give me more satisfaction than what I do at work, but personal projects don't give me any money, as it should be, or I'd be compelled to work faster.

My work is not a craft, and that's fine. I'm just another human helping other humans advancing the company to acquire more money. I respect and understand my boss's incentives to get more money and they respect my needs to build maintainable software. So, more often than not, we meet in the middle. Sometimes more toward my view, other times towards theirs.

There's even levels to anger, and I don't think this author is referring to venting annoyance or expressing politely to someone that they did something wrong. "Oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years" anyone would get annoyed by that, it's only human. There are plenty of ways people express annoyance. Throwing a fit over it and screaming at your boss or coworkers is just dumb.

(Yes, of course I'd get mad if someone started doodling in the corner of my painting. I'd also get mad if a coworker went on my computer and deleted files at random. These are contrived scenarios that don't apply to 99.9% of regular office work.)

I often hear stories from more toxic workplaces about engineers yelling during meetings, insulting and degrading each other, etc. That's the kind of anger that's unproductive and largely unwarranted unless you're literally working on a life-or-death scenario (which some engineers are, but the vast majority are not).

And that's really what it comes down to. For the overwhelming majority of software projects, it's just not that deep. You mention "artists and craftspeople" but even for them, it's really not that deep. Artists and craftspeople go through tons of abuse, annoying clients, etc. and they don't respond to it by flipping their shit and getting mad. At the end of the day it's just a job, we can value it, but it's almost certainly not important enough to be worth getting angry about.

What? This is a very confusing statement...

The word engineer does not refer to only software engineers. And even if it did, I've never met an engineer who thought of their professional work as art. Are you sure you dislike engineers in general? 'Cause that's a pretty big group you just generalized about.

Have you not heard the classic joke? The optimist sees the glass as half-full. The pessimist: half-empty. The engineer sees the glass as twice as big as it needs to be.

This is the essence of engineering - solving problems safely, efficiently and economically.

Many engineers are craftspeople and artists. What makes you think they can't separate their professional duties from their other interests?